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The old metal boxes trailed around the ocean since 1931 have accidentally created a record in the history of ocean plastics.
The devices – known as Continuous Plankton Recorders (CPR) – first trapped a plastic bag off the Irish coast in 1965.
Researchers say this could be the first plastic marine litter found.
The CPR registry also revealed how much plastic had been found in the ocean in recent decades.
How did scientists "accidentally" find plastic?
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MBA
Researchers used research equipment that was invented in the 1920s
By fishing plankton for all these decades – a key species that indicates the productivity of the ocean and is therefore particularly interesting for monitoring the health of fisheries – the machines have also produced a history of plastic litter.
Dr. Clare Ostle, Principal Investigator at the Marine Biological Association in Plymouth, explained that CPR's "fleet" was designed and built to be towed by ships. They capture plankton samples in the water column and retain them in a mesh.
But each time something got entangled in the recorder and had to be removed, the team in charge of the device would record what had happened in a log.
"We search through [those logs] and what we understood was that we had very early historic cases of entanglement of plastics, "said Dr. Ostle.
"We can build a time series from that, so we can actually see the increase in the biggest plastic entanglements."
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What does this chronology of ocean plastic show?
One of the headlines is that it shows what appears to be the first record of a plastic bag in the ocean – a bag that has fallen into a trap when a police vehicle was towed off the Irish coast in 1965.
Other highlights of the study include:
- Plastic fishing line found in 1957
- Confirmation of a significant and steady increase in ocean plastic since 1990
- More fortunately, the number of plastic bags found in the ocean has declined in recent years, but it is not known if this is related to bans and charges introduced around the world.
What harm does plastic cause in the ocean?
A box in the Plymouth laboratory contains some of the plastics entangled in the plankton recorder
Marine animals can be entangled in larger plastics, especially ropes, nets and ropes. Last year, a BBC documentary crew filmed dead seabirds on an isolated, hungry death island, filled with stomach fragments of plastic.
Much smaller microplastics – often the result of the decomposition of bulky elements – have been found in fish, seabed sediments and even in Antarctic ice. They remain more of an open question; Scientists are studying whether ingestion of these tiny plastic fragments is harmful.
The researchers involved in this study hope that the "wave of awareness" on ocean plastics will help reduce the amount of waste that is found in the sea.
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